ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605060002
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MIKE HUDSON
JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: The Saga of the New Underclass. By Dale Maharidge. Photography by Michael Williamson. Hyperion. $17.95.
Last October, old pals Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson got together in Sacramento and reminisced about a book they had done together a decade before. "Journey to Nowhere" had been a heartbreaking book about America's growing class of dispossessed. But despite its wrenching images of homeless men riding the rails and families living in cardboard shanties, it sold modestly after it came out in 1985. It soon went out of print.
Maharidge and Williamson moved on to greater things, winning a Pulitzer Prize for "And Their Children After Them," their 1989 book about a family of Alabama sharecroppers.
But "Journey to Nowhere" was still special, a project that had helped launch their careers. During their reunion last fall, they recalled their cross-country reporting treks and even went to the spot in the former Western Pacific Railroad yard where they'd first hopped a freight together. They felt both melancholy and pride remembering their book - almost forgotten and, they assumed, forever dead.
The next day something odd happened. Maharidge had a message on his answering machine, out of nowhere, from an assistant to Bruce Springsteen. The rock-and-roll superstar wanted to talk about the decade-old book. "It was very surreal, and it still is," Maharidge says.
It turned out Springsteen had pulled the book from his shelf one sleepless night as he was finishing his latest album, "The Ghost of Tom Joad." He read it cover to cover. Then he wrote two songs ("Youngstown" and "The New Timer") based upon people on its pages. "Youngstown" tells of steelworkers who earned their pay stoking blast furnaces and sent their sons to their nation's wars, only to find themselves out of jobs, out of luck. "Now sir you tell me the world's changed/Once I made you rich enough/Rich enough to forget my name."
Springsteen invited the journalists backstage at a concert and talked them into rereleasing the book. Around Thanksgiving, Maharidge and Williamson returned to the places they visited during the early 1980s. Maharidge wrote a new epilogue noting that Youngstown's newest industry is prisons. "It's going to be former steelworkers guarding former steelworkers," one man laments.
And Springsteen wrote an introduction for the new edition. "What if the craft I'd learned was suddenly obsolete, no longer needed," he wonders. "What would I do to take care of my family? What wouldn't I do?"
Mike Hudson is a reporter with this newspaper.
Hear the Songs. Call InfoLine to listen to the Bruce Springsteen songs inspired by the book, "Journey to Nowhere."
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: MICHAEL WILLIAMSON. 1. The authors backstage withby CNBSpringsteen (center). 2. (Top left) Ken Pratt Sr. with his son, Ken
Jr., in front of the dead Jeanette furnace. 3. (Above) These people
hitchhiked from Michigan to Texas looking for work. But they gave up
on Texas and are going home - even though they don't have jobs
there. 4. (Left) A makeshift nightstand in a hut, ghost village. KEYWORDS: INFOLINE